Sóstó (Surf Beach)

About this spot

Sóstó — everyone still calls it Surf Beach — is the birthplace of the sport in Hungary: kitesurf.hu's own history of the scene starts in Siófok in 2002, when a handful of locals bought the first kites, and the Siófoki Kiteosok club has been holding the beach ever since. It is also the best-documented launch on the lake: the club marks it on the national spot map, the wind reports here are used as the reference for the whole south shore, and on a good summer day the field fills with 70–100 kites at once. Budapest is 100 km away, all of it motorway, so half a day after work is a normal thing to do here.

The beach is a roughly 20 m grass strip between the lake and a block of apartments, and the access is the part that surprises people: a long private spur runs down to the water, only vehicles with a permit may drive it, and the four or five spaces at the end are usually taken — so most people park at the mouth of the spur and walk the kit in. Launch is from the stone spit at the western end, where the club keeps the rocks arranged so you can get off the bank, and the water is the classic Balaton story: shallow, soft sand and silt, standing or waist depth for a couple of hundred metres, flat to lightly chopped, with waves that can be worth a strapless session further out. South of the school zone the water goes glassy and flat, which is where people work on unwrapped tricks; north of the grass the fetch builds real chop.

Wind-wise this is a north-quarter spot: the cold fronts that roll down from the north and north-west are what Hungary gets most often, they blow onshore here, and riders rate the wind as noticeably cleaner and less gusty than on Lake Velence. A westerly comes in side-shore and works too. Anything from the south is offshore and should stay on the bank — the far shore is kilometres away and the lake is wide enough that a drift is not a joke. The hazards are mostly on land and mostly recent: the apartment block means very little room to set a kite down, a small mistake puts the canopy on a spiked fence that will cut it open or sends a rider into the building, the trees shade and gust the wind over the lawn, and in the water the wakeboard cable's concrete anchor weights and the windsurfers who cross in from the railway crossing are the things to keep clear of. Schools teach in the waist-deep water just off the entry, so give them room and ask them to keep the incoming lane clear.